A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

And it is here that we finally approach the heart of the Lovecraft Mythos. What Lovecraft was really doing was creating (as David E. Schultz has felicitously expressed it²²) an anti-mythology

. What is the purpose behind most religions and mythologies? It is to ‘justify the ways of God to men’.²³ Human beings have always considered themselves at the centre of the universe; they have peopled the universe with gods of varying natures and capacities as a means of explaining natural phenomena, of accounting for their own existence, and of shielding themselves from the grim prospect of oblivion after death. Every religion and mythology has established some vital connection between gods and human beings, and it is exactly this connection that Lovecraft is seeking to subvert with his pseudomythology.

From the cosmicism of ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ to the apparent mundaneness of ‘Pickman’s Model’—written, apprently, in early September—seems a long step backward; and, while this tale cannot be deemed one of Lovecraft’s best, it contains some features of interest. The narrator, Thurber, writing in a colloquial style very unusual for Lovecraft, tells of the painter Richard Upton Pickman of Boston, whose spectacularly horrific paintings violently disturb him. Later Thurber learns that the monsters depicted by Pickman in his paintings are taken ‘from life’.

No reader can have failed to predict this conclusion, but the tale is more interesting not for its actual plot but for its setting and its aesthetics. The setting—the North End of Boston, then (as now) a largely Italian district—is portrayed quite faithfully, right down to many of the street names; but, less than a year after writing the story, Lovecraft was disappointed to find that much of the area had been razed to make way for new development. Aside from its topographical accuracy, ‘Pickman’s Model’ expresses, in fictionalized form, many of the aesthetic principles on weird fiction that Lovecraft had just outlined in ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’.

‘The Call of Cthulhu’ was initially rejected by Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales

, but it is predictable that Wright would snap up the more conventional ‘Pickman’s Model’, publishing it in the October 1927 issue.

Lovecraft was doing more than writing original fiction; he was no doubt continuing to make a meagre living by revision, and in the process was slowly attracting would-be weird writers who offered him stories for correction. In the summer of 1926 his new friend Wilfred B. Talman came to him with a story entitled ‘Two Black Bottles’. Lovecraft found promise in the tale—Talman, let us recall, was only twenty-two at this time, and writing was not his principal creative outlet—but felt that changes were in order. By October the tale was finished, more or less to both writers’ satisfaction. The end result is nothing to write home about, but it managed to land with Weird Tales and appeared in the August 1927 issue.

A revision job of a very different sort on which Lovecraft worked in October was The Cancer of Superstition

. This appears to have been a collaborative project on which Lovecraft and C. M. Eddy worked at the instigation of Harry Houdini. Houdini performed in Providence in early October, at which time he asked Lovecraft to do a rush job—an article attacking astrology—for which he paid $75.00. This article has not come to light; but perhaps it supplied the nucleus for what was apparently to be a full-length polemic against superstitions of all sorts. Houdini had himself written several works of this kind—including A Magician among the Spirits (1924), a copy of which he gave to Lovecraft with an inscription— but he now wished something with more scholarly rigour.

But Houdini’s sudden death on 31 October put an end to the endeavour, as his wife did not wish to pursue it. This may have been just as well, for the existing material is undistinguished and largely lacks the academic support a work of this kind needs. Lovecraft may have been well versed in anthropology for a layman, but neither he nor Eddy had the scholarly authority to bring this venture to a suitable conclusion.

Shortly after the writing of ‘Pickman’s Model’, something strange occurs—Lovecraft is back in New York. He arrived no later than Monday, 13 September, for he speaks of seeing a film with Sonia that evening. I am not certain of the purpose of this visit—it clearly was only a visit, and I suspect the impetus came from Sonia. Lovecraft, although of course still married to Sonia, seems to have reverted to the guest status he occupied during his 1922 visits: he spent most of his time with the gang, particularly Long, Kirk, and Orton. On Sunday the 19th Lovecraft left for Philadelphia. Sonia had insisted on treating him to this excursion, presumably as recompense for returning to the ‘pest-zone’.